The five-cent RFID tag was famously claimed to be the tipping point for the RFID industry that would lead to widespread adoption of the technology. While many of the innovations in cost reduction outlined in 2001 have come to pass, the five-cent price point has remained elusive at any quantity. Presently, EPC Gen2 tags (ISO-18000-6c) can be readily purchased individually for ninety-cents online and industry trade magazines report that, in large volumes, tags can be purchased in the seven- to fifteen-cent range. While both academia and industry continue to make strides to reduce the cost of traditional UHF RFID tags, the reality is that due to inflationary forces the opportunity for a five-cent tag may have already passed us by.
In an effort to further reduce cost and tag complexity, researchers are focusing on developing chip-less and antenna-less RFID tags. The general rule of thumb being that—a third of the cost of the tag is the integrated circuit (IC), the second third is the antenna inlay, and the final third represents the cost of bonding the two elements together. Therefore, by eliminating one of these elements, it should be possible to further reduce the cost of RFID tags.
However, all of these RF methods of uniquely identifying an object rely on adding some form of tag. For many applications, RFID is simply dismissed as being too expensive compared to the alternative of using optical identification in the form of printed barcodes or QR codes. While barcodes are often considered to be “free” they do take up valuable real estate on print media and/or require printed stickers that are manually applied to objects, both of which represent non-zero costs. This begs the question: Can Radio Frequency Identification ever cost less than a barcode?
It is against this background that the techniques described herein have been developed.